Out with the pout

Trends Always on the look-out for the latest hot look,
the global rag trade is getting real. On the eve of Melbourne
Spring Fashion Week, Janice Breen Burns explains why women are back
in vogue.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL woman in world fashion is 19 years old but
could pass for 13, or 12 at a pinch. She is 177 centimetres tall
with abnormally long legs, slender arms, a thin, narrow torso and
no bust to speak of. Her neck is swan-like in the truest sense and
her head noticeably small for her body. Her pixie face is one
reason former Perth schoolgirl Gemma Ward's blue/green eyes appear
huge and her mouth softer and wider than most. She is often
described as baby faced, which is unnervingly accurate. Sometimes
she is described as an alien beauty for her resemblance to Steven
Spielberg's movie versions of unearthly beings: gangly,
almond-eyed, pointy-chinned innocents.

Ward is currently No. 1, or the best performing fashion model,
in the world. Two of her contemporaries, whose careers took off
fuelled by their likeness to her - Jessica Stam and a model known
simply as Sasha - are also rated in modelling's top five.

Ward is the most striking archetype of beauty that fashion could
come up with in the past decade, the most memorable and mimicked
"look" since Kate Moss. She fizzes with innocent sexuality, at the
same time triggering those intense gut feelings of tenderness most
humans get towards helpless big-eyed babies.

The first season after Ward mesmerised the international fashion
fraternity as a 16-year-old in 2003, model agencies everywhere
bristled with Gemma-likes. One in this mould who joined the
juggernaut only recently, is a young model named Adelaide, managed
by Stephen Bucknall of Melbourne's FRM agency. He hawked her book
around FRM's affiliated agencies in Europe and the US a few weeks
ago and found the Gemma thing, four years on, is still a powerful
force in fashion: "I was made offers by up to 20 agencies,"
Bucknall says.

"All remarked on her similarity to super model Gemma Ward." The
trip locked Adelaide's career into the international modelling
industry's exotic zoo at precisely the right place and time.
Although she is the face of local retail precinct Collins 234 and
booked for several Melbourne Spring Fashion Week catwalks, it is
overseas where Adelaide will make her mark and money.

Exactly how her Gemma-like looks will be exploited, however - as
a vacant-eye pretty baby, or as a powerful young woman in charge of
her own destiny - will vary with each photographer and advertising
or catwalk client.

Ward's baby face has launched countless careers like Adelaide's.
It's the way fashion and our notions of what's hip, what's
beautiful, works. "The types of models are dictated by the
designers starting at Paris, Milan and New York," explains
Bucknall.

"So the agencies provide that type, scout for that type, get
more of that type, then the fashion editors pick them up and they
appear in the magazines and on the runways, so the agencies provide
more, scout for more."

And so it goes on. It's a cycle of power that begets a certain
kind of beauty that is circulated, not as a commercial look to
everywoman and everyman in Kmart catalogues or in television
sitcoms - because that is a different realm of popular culture and
clothing sales - but in high-fashion media, on the leading edge of
popular culture where the most impressionable and experimental of
us congregate.

It is these, almost invariably young, consumers who take the
measure of their own and each other's beauty - or lack of it - from
models, and who mimic the images of sexuality often overtly
expressed by their idols on catwalks and in glossy magazines. And
finally, it is the impact of those images on the young that has
spurred international debate about the rise in use of models
perceived as too young, too thin and too sexualised.

According to Matthew Anderson, a director of Melbourne's top
model agency Chadwick, there are good commercial reasons (apart
from buoyant competition between increasing numbers of agencies to
contract the prettiest ones as early as possible) for the current,
brimming population of very young and young-looking girls in the
modelling market: "To sell beauty and wealth - simple," he
says.

"And there's nothing wrong with using youth and sex to sell
beauty and wealth if you've got the resources, like Chanel, say, or
Versace or Prada, to do it appropriately. But this industry, on the
creative side, attracts a lot of idiots who don't have much taste,
have a very crass idea of sex, and don't understand that you can
have a sexy image that is not overtly about sex."

The gun-powder combination of childlike beauty and sexual
imagery, heavily peppered with issues such as thinness and models'
health, regularly explodes into public debate and when it does,
Anderson says his phone rings off the hook. "We're in the firing
line but, hang on, we're not creating the images." He does,
however, observe closely what his 200-odd clients do with his
models and, he says, the images are changing.

It is hard to say why: whether fashion is simply correcting
itself - as it does when it has exploited a look to its zenith - or
if those debates and attempts to regulate modelling in markets such
as Spain (which introduced a body mass index minimum of 18 per cent
for catwalk models) and France (which banned under 16s) have had a
positive impact.

Whatever the reason, subtle but noticeable shifts are happening
in fashion, and in modelling generally. The epidemic of baby-faced,
extremely thin, teen models still dominates, but the way they are
being used on the catwalk, in ad campaigns and editorial shoots is
turning or, at least, expanding. Their extreme youth - the
baby/woman look so personified by Ward - is less often emphasised.
Their vacant looks, or come-hither pouts and hooded lids, are being
replaced with frank, open stares into the camera lens, or sharp,
quirky personas that are more high fashion than hot sex.

A slender, baby-faced rookie model such as Alina, 16,
represented by Melbourne's Elite Models for example, is more likely
to work in edgy, fashion editorial campaigns than the kind that
require doe-eyed, vacant looks, legs akimbo and Lolita pouts. Alina
is a Melbourne girl born of Russian parents and was developed from
a kooky teen with half-shaved head and purple hair into the frank,
spiked blonde, high-fashion character she is now, by Elite managing
director and 27-year-veteran of the London, Paris, Milan and New
York model industries, Erika Pek.

"Alina's not going to appeal to the everyday consumer," says
Pek, "And we're a bit behind the international market here, so I
sent her to London and she's been working since day one."

Pek agrees with Anderson that greed and furious competition
between modelling agencies brought the current flood of young
girls, most of whom, she says, will quickly disappear as fashion's
imagery changes, because they lack even a flicker of the legendary
X-factor that separates a good model from the flock.

"Alina's got it. It's in the eyes," says Pek. "I've represented
plenty of girls that were technically stunning but there was a
vacancy in their eyes." The flood of Gemma-likes will be sorted,
according to Pek, by their ability to be something other than a
fashion rack and to convey something other than vacuous or sexy
prettiness: "Something strong and different that says who they are,
their personality," she says.

"Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, those girls had something to
project, something worldly, but you take a 14-year-old who is naive
and innocent - that's angelic, pretty, and there's a purity, it's a
look, but it's nothing different."

What is noticeably different, says Anderson: "Is the way people
are starting to market or mould (models) in more of a womanly,
sophisticated sense now. That whole thing of women and girls
looking frail is over; that look of a campaign with a young girl
cowering in the corner, looking all fragile, like she needed
violating or saving - probably by men - has been over editorially
for at least a year internationally and we're catching up here
now."

Anderson uses a Guess fashion campaign by one of his
top-performing models, New York-based Melbourne girl Jessica Hart,
21, as an example. Hart is arrestingly pretty in a Gemma-like way,
and distinctly young, with soft pillow lips and a gap in her front
teeth. Even that, according to Anderson, would not have been
tolerated by some clients until recently because it was a quirky
distraction - a sign of individuality - from the preferred look of
vacant sexiness or prettiness.

"But, see here now - Jess looks powerful, beautiful. You
couldn't pick, really, how old she is. They've used her in a
sophisticated way that's very sexy, but not tarty or overt," he
says. "This is what is slowly changing - clients are wanting a girl
to look stronger. It's still a look that says 'come and get me' but
it's saying 'come and get me on my terms'. It's sexuality back in
her control."

Anderson says he vigorously encourages all new recruits to his
agency to "lose the pouty thing". "We're having to tell them, stop
the pouting, hold your head high. They're doing that sex thing
because that's what's been asked of them. But we're saying, find
what's different about yourself and embrace it. Don't be one of the
flock."

Even in the real Gemma Ward's recent campaigns - Prada and Louis
Vuitton for example - she is posed as focused and strong, a
distinct personality, with a direct gaze and indeterminate age. It
is a change which may or may not be attributable to the public
outcry about young, sexualised models, but whatever the reason,
Anderson is chuffed it happened.

"At the end of the day, we're only a shop," he says of Chadwick.
"We supply beautiful people - the blank canvas - and clients turn
them into advertising tools. But I'm glad the tide's going out on
women being represented as these vacant, skinny victims," he
says.

"The closest thing I can relate this to is the early '90s when
the whole supermodel thing happened. Those girls were never
wallflowers, they stood up proud, held their heads high, they had
boobs and hips and you knew when they were in the room."

Anderson's words particularly resonate with the rise of
high-profile models such as David Jones' Megan Gale, Myer's
Jennifer Hawkins, and with a blossoming scene of "va-va-voom deja
vu" overseas. Former supermodel Claudia Schiffer is covergirl on
the August Vogue Paris, for example, and in July,
fashion's most influential designer, John Galliano, gave a brace of
supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and
Brazilian bombshell Gisele Bundchen, star spots in his haute
couture show of tightly corseted womanly frocks similar to those
popularised in the 1950s by his predecessor, Christian Dior.

Across fashion editorial imagery, those luminous names, faces
and bodies of modelling are increasingly prominent, and even those
celebrities presented as inspirational (or aspirational in a
fashion sense), are less likely to be vacuous and anorexically
thin, a la Nicole Richie, and more likely to be womanly, a la
Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce.

FRM's Stephen Bucknall sees this feminine aesthetic as a shift
towards a more general public appeal among his clients: "It's more
of an advertising commercial look," he says. "It's healthy,
curvaceous and beautiful, and it will slowly infiltrate and come
back into vogue because the world is more health-conscious. There's
been a lot of negativity bombarding us via the press about eating
disorders and models that are very young," he says.

"Your editorial (high fashion) look - which has been your
beanpole, gaunt, angelic, and very young girl - well, magazine
editors are finally getting it and finally making a shift back to
models that are women and look the part."

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week starts on Monday and runs until
September 10. For an event schedule and booking information see www.thatsmelbourne.com.au

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